The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara [73]
Chamberlain said to Kilrain, “He can’t have been long in this country.”
“No. A recent import, you might say.”
“I wonder how much he knows of what’s happening.”
Kilrain shrugged. A crowd was gathering. Chamberlain said, “Get a surgeon to look at that wound.”
He backed off. He stared at the palm of his own hand. A matter of thin skin. A matter of color. The reaction is instinctive. Any alien thing. And yet Chamberlain was ashamed; he had not known it was there. He thought: If I feel this way, even I, an educated man … what was in God’s mind?
He remembered the minister: and what if it is you who are wrong, after all?
Tom came bubbling up with a message from Vincent: the corps would move soon, on further orders. Tom was chuckling.
“Lawrence, you want to hear a funny thing? We were talking to these three Reb prisoners, trying to be sociable, you know? But mainly trying to figure ’em out. They were farm-type fellers. We asked them why they were fighting this war, thinkin’ on slavery and all, and one fella said they was fightin’ for their ‘rats.’ Hee. That’s what he said.” Tom giggled, grinned. “We all thought they was crazy, but we hadn’t heard a-right. They kept on insistin’ they wasn’t fightin’ for no slaves, they were fightin’ for their ‘rats.’ It finally dawned on me that what the feller meant was their ‘rights,’ only, the way they talk, it came out ‘rats.’ Hee. Then after that I asked this fella what rights he had that we were offendin’, and he said, well, he didn’t know, but he must have some rights he didn’t know nothin’ about. Now, aint that something?”
“Button your shirt,” Chamberlain said.
“Yassuh, boss. Hey, what we got here?” He moved to see the surrounded black. The surgeon had bent over the man and the red eyes had gone wild with new fear, rolling horselike, terrified. Chamberlain went away, went back to the coffeepot. He felt a slow deep flow of sympathy. To be alien and alone, among white lords and glittering machines, uprooted by brute force and threat of death from the familiar earth of what he did not even know was Africa, to be shipped in black stinking darkness across an ocean he had not dreamed existed, forced then to work on alien soil, strange beyond belief, by men with guns whose words he could not even comprehend. What could the black man know of what was happening? Chamberlain tried to imagine it. He had seen ignorance, but this was more than that. What could this man know of borders and states’ rights and the Constitution and Dred Scott? What did he know of the war? And yet he was truly what it was all about. It simplified to that. Seen in the flesh, the cause of the war was brutally clear.
He thought of writing Fanny a quick letter. Dreamyly. He wanted to tell her about the black man. He wanted time to think. But the 83rd Pennsylvania was up and forming. Ellis Spear was coming along the line. It came to Chamberlain suddenly that they might move from here to battle. Under his command. He took a deep breath. Bloody lonely feeling.
He moved back to the cluster around the black man. The shirt was off and Nolan was attending him. The light was stronger; the sun was a blood red ball just over the hills. Chamberlain saw a glistening black chest, massive muscles. The black man was in pain.
Nolan said, “He’ll be all right, Colonel. Bullet glanced off a rib. Cut the skin. Looks just like anybody else inside.” Nolan clucked in surprise. “Never treated a Negro before. This one’s a tough one. They all got muscles like this one, Colonel?”
“We’ll have to leave him,” Chamberlain said. “Let him have some rations, try to give him directions. Buster, can you talk to him?”
“A little. Found out who shot him. It was some woman in that town there, Gettysburg.”
“A woman?”
“He came into town looking for directions and a woman came out on a porch and shot at him. He don’t understand. I guess she didn’t want to take a chance on being caught with him. But shoot him? Christ. He crawled out here figurin’ on dyin’.”
Chamberlain shook his head slowly.
Kilrain said, “He